PwnageTool

Our polls for the “Apple TV Hacks Best of 2011 Award” closed on the 15th of February. The participation was amazing: we have received over 3000 entries. Surprisingly, the competition wasn’t stiff. It looks like it was pretty easy for you to decide who should have won as aTV Flash (black) has been clearly leading the competition from the very start to the end. As a result, FireCore’s flagship product won with 40 percent of the vote. XBMC for Apple TV 2 took the second place with 21 percent and the third place went to Seas0nPass with 9 percent of the vote.

2011 was a good year for Apple TV. Although it seems that everyone is already waiting for Apple TV set (are you?), some hackers and developers have worked really hard through the whole 2011 on jailbreaks and software that supercharged our silver and black boxes. Various hacks, jailbreaks, plugins and add-ons convinced us the Apple TV is more than just a simple hobby device that only lets you buy movies on iTunes and listen to some odd radio stations.

It’s time to select the best of the best, to choose “AppleTVHacks Best of 2011”!

We are asking for your votes for the best Apple TV (both 1st and 2nd generation) hack/jailbreak/plugin/add-on/software of 2011. We chose the nominees; the award is people’s choice. The winner will receive “AppleTVHacks Best of 2011 Award” and will be featured on our site.

Firecore has just updated Seas0nPass to support a TETHERED jailbreak of the new Apple TV 4.4 (iOS 5) software (also supported is the 4.4.1 update). A tethered jailbreak means every time there is a need to reboot your Apple TV, you will have to connect it to a computer. The new Seas0nPas doesn’t supportXBMC, Plex, Remote HD and Rowmote plugins yet, so think twice before deciding to upgrade to 4.4 and run the jailbreak.

If the support for Media Player, Couch Surfer, NitoTV, Last.fm, Weather, RSS Feeds and Overflow and the new Apple TV 4.4 features, like AirPlay Mirroring, Photo Stream, NHL and WSJ Live are enough to convince you to update, you can then jailbreak your atv following these steps:

FireCore has just released Seas0nPass 0.7.7 that features support for Lion and a handful of bug fixes. It’s generally designed to jailbreak your atv2 running iOS 4.3.x (Apple TV 2 4.2.2 software version) but, according to nitoTV, it also supports the latest iOS 5 beta.

Similar to PwnageTool, Seas0nPass allows you to jailbreak your atv2 by creating custom Apple TV IPSW files and restoring them in iTunes. The new version of Seas0nPass is Mac only – it adds support for Lion and fixes Mac specific bugs.

Here is the tutorial on how to jailbreak your Apple TV 2 on iOS 4.3 (Apple TV 4.2.2) or iOS 5 using Seas0nPass 0.7.7:

Apple released minor software update for Apple TV 2 – labeled 4.2.2 – which generally fixes some audio and video playback issues (see the full list of changes below). The IPSW name is still 4.3, but the build version changed from 8F202 to 8F305. @i0n1c has already updated Apple TV 2 kernel for his original 4.3.1 untether. NitoTV confirmed that the new untether works “beautifully” and he said there should be a new Seas0nPass out very soon.

For those who still have problems jailbreaking Apple TV 2 on iOS 4.3 with SeasOnPass, sn0wbreez is the alternative you should give a try to. The software has been updated to version 2.5.1 just a couple of days ago and it can now jailbreak your atv2 on the latest software in a flash (less than 10 minutes in our case). Considered as the unofficial PwnageTool for Windows, sn0wbreeze works with Windows XP, Vista and 7.

Here is the step-by-step tutorial on how to jailbreak your Apple TV 2 on iOS 4.3 (Apple TV 4.2.1) using sn0wbreez 2.5.1: